Migration, ethnicity and uneven-development in Ghana: The case of the Upper West region in the twentieth century

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness between labor migration, uneven-development and ethnogenesis in the Upper West region of Ghana. It examines the reasons why people who were not forced nor overburdened by tax obligations willingly migrated to other parts of the country. Over the last two decades, Africanist scholars have written extensively on ethnicity, migration and uneven-development. Yet few have sought to understand them as imbricated social processes. Ghana's Upper West region has served as a reservoir of labor for the southern part of the country for most of the twentieth century and today one can find at least three generations of migrants in any given village/town whose experiences both mirror and differ substantially from migrants in other parts of Africa.;Attempts to explain this phenomenon have always centered on theories of overpopulation, land shortage, taxation, lack of resources, and “bright lights,” which compelled northerners to migrate to the South in search of wage labor. Focusing on the lived experiences of Dagaaba men and women who migrated to the South between 1936 and the present, this study shifts the angle of vision from these ahistorical explanations and foregrounds the internal ways in which communities shaped migration through extended, gendered social debates over production and reproduction by examining how different factors and social processes have historically intersected to impact labor migration and regional inequalities over successive generations.;It argues that the causes of labor migration among the Dagaaba of the Nadowli district have been rooted in gendered social processes and generational relationships internal to their communities and that no single push/pull theory can fully explain either the reasons for migration or the continued disparities in economic development between northern and southern Ghana.;The study also challenges the notion that ethnicity and ethnic identities in Africa were colonial constructions. It argues that in order to understand how present ethnic identities are rooted in the pre-colonial past, we need to move beyond the narrow definition of ethnicity as based on “invented cultural, linguistic, and regional groupings” and examine how kinship, migration, and time of settlement have influenced the construction of ethnicity.